In Unpredictable Canadian Elections, Plurality Is More Important Than Popularity

Tom Mulcair of the New Democratic Party. Each of Canada's three big parties has led in one poll or another, but the country’s robust, dizzying political culture and first-past-the-post-system of simple plurality make it hard to predict an outcome.Credit
Ian Willms for The New York Times

TORONTO — Stephen Harper did not get to be prime minister of Canada by persuading most of the country’s voters to put him in office, and that is not how he intends to keep the job in the general elections on Monday.

Thanks to a splintered opposition, Mr. Harper and his Conservative Party have prevailed in three straight elections and held power for nine years without ever winning more than 40 percent of the vote.

“A national election is not a popularity contest,” Mr. Harper said in August, when he moved to dissolve Parliament.

With that first tactical strike, Mr. Harper opened Canada’s longest official federal campaign season in at least a century, an absorbing and at times strikingly vitriolic spectacle of political calculation. In broad strokes, Mr. Harper said his re-election would bring “stability, not risk.” The main opposition groups, the New Democratic Party and the Liberal Party, say they will restore Canadian traditions of progressive liberalism and roll back what they see as the Harper era’s bellicose posture in foreign affairs.

Retail-level politics is now conducted in a dozen or so languages, as candidates try to reach voters at festivals and supermarkets, in community centers and on doorsteps. Nearly half of all residents in the Toronto suburbs were born outside Canada, in China, South Asia, Africa, the Caribbean and the Middle East.

Some ridings, or parliamentary districts, were decided by fewer than 1,000 votes in the last elections. This time, it is not just party machines that are trying to grab those seats. A swath of nonaligned voters, known as A.B.C.s, Anything But Conservative, have organized online to pool and swap votes.

For instance, Olivier Jarvis Lavoie, a 32-year old researcher who lives in a Toronto riding unlikely to vote Conservative, struck a deal with a friend, a Green Party supporter who lives in an Ottawa district where a Conservative candidate is competitive.

“He said, ‘If you’re willing to vote Green in your riding, I will vote for whichever candidate is best positioned to defeat the Conservative,’ ” Mr. Lavoie said.

As of Saturday, one campaign had drawn more than 89,000 pledges to switch votes in close-fought districts to candidates who seemed to have the best chance of beating the Conservative nominees.

“It’s a Rubik’s Cube here in Canada: a three-dimensional electoral map with history, immigration and vote switching,” said John Wright, a senior vice president with Ipsos Reid, a polling and marketing company.

Photo

Justin Trudeau of the Liberal Party.Credit
Chris Wattie/Reuters

Since August, each of the three big parties has led in one poll or another, but the robust, dizzying political culture puts the race well beyond the reach of trustworthy handicapping. At least six parties have fielded nearly 1,800 candidates for seats in all or some of the 338 ridings, spread from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific and north to the Arctic. In each riding, a simple plurality determines the winner. Any party with a majority in Parliament — 170 or more members — selects the prime minister and forms the government.

“Even with six in 10 people hating them, the Conservatives could still win with a massive parliamentary majority at 38 percent of the popular vote, or a comfortable majority at 37 percent,” Mr. Wright said.

The same arithmetic might also work for the New Democrats, led by Thomas Mulcair, or the Liberals, led by Justin Trudeau, whose father, Pierre Elliott Trudeau, was prime minister for 15 years into the early 1980s.

In their fight to be recognized as the standard bearers of change, Mr. Mulcair, 60, and Mr. Trudeau, 43, have been hostile to each other but both have said that they would try to block Mr. Harper from forming government if the Conservatives or their own parties do not get a majority.

Mr. Trudeau took over the Liberals in 2013 when the party was in shambles after a historic rout two years earlier. By all accounts, it has been restored to a position as a serious political force. Recent polls show it in the lead.

The youngest of the main candidates, Mr. Trudeau has led a campaign of high style and tight scripts, inviting photographers to see him sparring in a boxing ring, paddling a canoe, or picking pumpkins with his wife and their three young children. He recently outlined a child welfare program in Montreal’s Olympic Stadium, saying that the arena’s seats could hold the 60,000 children who would be lifted out of poverty under the Liberal proposal. As a video drone operated by one of his aides buzzed overhead in the nearly empty stadium, he waved, smiled and boarded a bus.

His opponents have tried to use his age, relative inexperience, and youthful appearance against him. One early Conservative ad ran through a list of Mr. Trudeau’s supposed shortcomings, and concluded with the line, “Nice hair though.” Another favored punch line: “Just not ready.”

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Mr. Mulcair was a bit more subtle, addressing Mr. Trudeau in debates as “Justin.”

The condescension may have backfired: Mr. Trudeau proved to be as forceful a presence as his opponents in debates that also included Elizabeth May of the Green Party, and Gilles Duceppe of the Bloc Québécois.

For his part, Mr. Mulcair, the leader of what has traditionally been Canada’s most left-leaning major party, came into the campaign as the front-runner. The party had surprised even itself by sweeping seats in Quebec in 2011.

That support was shaken when the Harper government pursued a ban on the niqab, a face veil worn by some Muslim women, during citizenship ceremonies. Many in the French-speaking region were in favor of the ban but Mr. Mulcair opposed it, saying that while he was not comfortable with the niqab, the courts had ruled against prohibiting it. The Conservatives, Mr. Mulcair charged, were using it as a “weapon of mass distraction.” Mr. Harper said the ban “reflects our values as a society.” So far, polls suggest, the niqab debate may have undermined the New Democrats in Quebec, and coincided with their loss of ground elsewhere.

“Harper was a genius in a way, Machiavellian,” said Christian Dufour, a political scientist at École Nationale d’Administration Publique in Montreal. “It was a big, big trap. Mulcair was unable to say ‘It’s common sense, when you swear, don’t wear it.’ He was out of sync with 93 percent of French-speaking Quebecers.”

The separatist Bloc Québécois party, which was nearly wiped out in Quebec by the New Democrats in 2011, quickly amplified the Conservatives’ attack. A Bloc ad managed to combine the niqab with the New Democrats’ unsettled position on a proposed oil sands pipeline. It showed a drop of black oil that spills and morphs into a niqab.

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Prime Minister Stephen Harper of the Conservative Party, on the campaign trail ahead of a general election Monday.Credit
Mark Blinch/Reuters

The niqab issue appears to have had marginal effect beyond Quebec. In the Ontario riding of East Brampton, a New Democratic candidate, Harbaljit Singh Kahlon, 33, knocks on doors every evening.

“It’s hard finding work,” said Maryam Lazar, 25, who trained as a chemical technician, told him. She emigrated from Iraq five years ago and became a Canadian citizen in January.

Ms. Lazar was one of about 25 people Mr. Kahlon met on a canvass last month with a reporter tagging along. Only one person mentioned the niqab. The others — Somalis, Punjabis, Bengalis, Tamils, Trinidadians, all recent Canadian citizens — spoke about immigration for relatives, jobs, traffic, car insurance rates, and a new sex education curriculum.

Kevin Page served from 2008 to 2013 as Canada’s first parliamentary budget officer and is now a professor at the University of Ottawa. “We have a federal party in power for almost 10 years, so it’s natural for opposition to talk about time for change,” he said. “We’ve also struggled this year economically.”

Mr. Harper has counted his economic stewardship of Canada through the global recession in 2008 as a major achievement. This year, though, depressed oil prices have hurt the western provinces, Mr. Page said, and manufacturing and exports have declined.

Mr. Trudeau has proposed deficit spending to stimulate the economy, arguing that low-interest rates make it prudent. Traditionally a more centrist party, the Liberals have outflanked Mr. Mulcair on the left; the New Democrats say they will balance the budget, paying for new programs with new taxes. Now that the Liberals are being taken more seriously, Mr. Harper has used a cash register sound effect when speaking of Mr. Trudeau’s fiscal plans.

One evening last month, Mr. Harper, 56, was led into a crowded Chinese festival in the Richmond Hill suburb of Toronto by a parade of young dancers, swaying dragons and bobbing tigers.

Under his leadership, Mr. Harper told his cheering audience, Canada would remain “the most admired, the best country in the world.”

Standing in the back, James Young, 52, an immigrant from Beijing, said he and many Chinese had once backed the Liberals. He belted out the Canadian anthem to greet Mr. Harper.

A few days later, Mr. Trudeau drew 5,000 people to a junior hockey arena about 25 miles away.

“Ontario will decide who will form the government,” said Pablo Rodriguez, a Liberal candidate on the east end of Montreal. “Quebec will decide if it’s a majority.”

As shoppers emerged from a supermarket, Mr. Rodriguez, 48, sized up each one’s background. His aim was unerring.

“Bonsoir!”

“Buon giorno!”

“Hello!”

An older man called to him in Spanish, and said he was from Peru.

“De Argentina,” Mr. Rodriguez answered.

“Ah,” the shopper replied. “Contigo.” With you.

Correction: October 20, 2015
An article on Saturday about the unpredictability of federal elections in Canada, where voters headed to the polls on Monday, misspelled a middle name of a former Canadian prime minister. He was Pierre Elliott Trudeau, not Elliot. And because of an editing error, an accompanying picture caption misspelled, in some copies, the given name of the current prime minister. As the article correctly noted, he is Stephen Harper, not Steven.

A version of this article appears in print on October 18, 2015, on Page A6 of the New York edition with the headline: Plurality, Not Popularity, Is Paramount in Unpredictable Canadian Elections. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe